Arsenal's best summer addition might be Martin Odegaard at his best as captain dazzles vs. Chelsea

The midfielder was locked in on Sunday as the hosts came from behind to knock off the Blues

Sep 6, 2026 at 3:17 pm ET • 5 min read

LONDON -- After a summer of haranguing and nail-biting, it turned out Arsenal did not need to worry about their shortage of world-class attackers. They had those at home already.

Which way is he going to go, you're wondering. This could be a celebration of Kai Havertz, whose flicks and feints had Chelsea necks twisted in their 2-1 defeat. Bukayo Saka might not have had a goal involvement. He offered everything else. But no, make this an ode to Martin Odegaard. He has deserved it.

Not until he was hoisting aloft Arsenal's first Premier League title in 22 years did the grumbling around the club captain truly subside. Odegaard's struggles last season were such that they occasionally broke containment from social media, the odd game where he dropped too deep too often, earning that exasperated sigh that no one does quite like the Emirates Stadium. A few months on, maybe you can see their point.

The Odegaard of 2024-25 and 2025-26 was one of the Premier League's better pure creators, a volume passer and progressor who could run a press with the efficiency of a union organiser. If the standard you were holding him to was most of his contemporaries, he was notably superior. The discord comes when the standards you hold him against are Odegaard's. Then you are looking for arguably the best creator in the league, the press, progression and passing conductor and a volume scorer. 

In the first title challenge of 2022-23 he delivered 15 goals off the back of almighty xG overperformance but at least he was getting in the spots to hit that hot streak. The year before, he had taken 53 shots. Then it was 93, then 77. The following year he was down at 49, the volume per 90 dropping below two, having previously been well clear. Last season Arsenal won the title as their attacking midfielder averaged fewer shots per 90 minutes than defensive midfielder Christian Norgaard or left back Riccardo Calafiori. That was when the xG drop-off really set in and when the grumbles really started to emerge about how little Odegaard was offering in the final third.

Was this all just a case of injuries robbing him off his oomph? Yes, it would appear it was. After all, he has gone from one goal all season last time out to scoring the same goal twice in a matter of weeks. For the winner today, read the third in the drubbing of Manchester City in Cardiff. Christos Tzolis driving in from the left, Havertz drawing attention with a dummy run and Odegaard's late run giving him the time to take a breath and pierce the ball past the goalkeeper.

With a scruffier finish against Coventry, surrounded by those two, it looks like Odegaard the scorer is back. The early season statistics back that up. Thirteen touches in the attacking penalty area is a mark that he needed 450 minutes across 10 league games to reach last season. This we're at that mark in less than half the time. Already, Odegaard has more shots on target from inside the penalty area than he did last season. 

In total, he averages about a shot more per 90 but from far better spots, his xG skyrocketing to 0.4 per 90 from 0.08. At his current rate of shot production (and with both the caveat of a tiny sample size and the acknowledgement that that makes it so much more fun to manipulate the figures), Odegaard will match his 2025-26 Premier League average around the hour mark at Sunderland next week. The creativity is skyrocketing too.

None of that seems to have come from anything Mikel Arteta has done. There are no new foibles to this Arsenal team that explain why Odegaard has requisitioned his groove back; it is not even the case that there has been a notable drop-off in touches in his own half of the field. This is a more straightforward story. A fully fit player has found the personal sweet spot between vindication, contentment and having a point to prove.

"He's fit, he feels confident, I think one of the highest that I've seen him, and he has a point to prove from last season as well, and after missing so much football," said Arteta.

"For me, he gets to that point because he's enjoying his football, and when you are that, you have to enjoy what you do, you have to play with real intent, and that's what I love to see him today, he was running forward, he took shots, he created so many situations for his teammates, so it was great.

"A point to prove is in everything, first of all, because he demands himself so much. He wants to be the best at everything and perfect at everything, and being perfect in certain things but being so efficient in other things is great as well. He's playing with real joy, he was phenomenal today."

As if it couldn't get better for Arteta, the same lines rang true of Havertz and Saka. No one is making up taglines as clunkily forced as JP Morgan for Arsenal's attack but there is no question that when these three are on song, the Gunners are at a level comparable with the very best in Europe. That much was clear at the back end of 2023-24 when they fired their way to 91 Premier League goals while just falling short of Erling Haaland and company. Their movement and interplay would punish far more organised rearguards than Chelsea's.

That is the warning against rushed judgements on Arsenal's attack. They had a lot to attack. Reece James looked every inch the right back shunted into midfield when he let Odegaard run away from him for the winner. Pedro Neto's man-marking job on Riccardo Calafiori gave him the best view of his fullback running off him. Unlike their previous two games, there was not much of a case to be made for an early goal warping any assessment of Chelsea. Their hosts weren't set off their stride; they just spent the 88 minutes after Morgan Rogers' opener forthrightly asserting their superiority on the Blues.

"This is the top level," Xabi Alonso acknowledged, though Arteta might beg to disagree. "It's an indication for us of how capable we are to perform at an even higher level than last season. It depends on how we maintain and sustain that desire, that humbleness and continue every day to try to find a better version of myself and the team. We still have a lot to grow and a lot to offer, and this is the ambition of the team."

An ambition typified by their club captain. The summer might not have delivered the complete package attacker that it was said this team missed. Evidently, Odegaard heard that. He is intent on proving himself to be exactly that.